Dark Knight Rises

In another amazing example of actors emulating their superhero roles, Christian Bale attempted to take a stand against the Chinese government yesterday. In Beijing to promote his Chinese state-produced movie, The Flowers of War, the Dark Knight star took an eight-hour drive to visit blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, an activist who’s represented women claiming the government forced them to have abortions or undergo sterilizations. Chen, 40, and his family under house arrest since September 2010, on charges of damaging property and disrupting traffic in a protest.

With a CNN crew in tow, Bale walked up to the lawyer’s house in Dongshigu Village, and was confronted by plainclothes police who shouted, pushed and punched the star in an attempt to get him to stop filming on his Flipcam. “When the dust settled, we counted a broken car, a damaged camera — and a Hollywood star disappointed at — but not shocked by — his failure to see a personal hero,” CNN Steven Jiang reported.
“I’m not brave doing this,” Bale said on the ride back to Beijing, as a police van followed them out of the village for 40 minutes. “The local people who are standing up to the authorities, who are visiting Chen and his family and getting beaten or detained, I want to support them.” Watch the video below.Read more…

Someone must have told Anne Hathaway that we weren’t exactly blown away by the sneak peek of her The Dark Knight Rises‘ Catwoman outfit. Goggles and a dramatic lip don’t really scream “feline superheroine,” do they? “I was not going to admit it: I asked someone to send me a few reactions. And I happen to know that MTV’s reaction was ‘meh,’” Hathaway told an MTV interviewer. “What I am happy to say is, if you didn’t like the photo Ã¢â‚¬â€ I’m gonna start with the negative Ã¢â‚¬â€ you only see about a tenth of what that suit can do. And if you did like the photo, you have excellent taste.” Hmm, unless the other 9/10 of what the suit can do involves a real mask, black vinyl with white stitching and a 34-year-old Michelle Pfeiffer, we will probably still have a problem with it.

Of course that isn’t the only Dark Knight drama surrounding Anne’s character. Yesterday one of the Catwoman stunt doubles smashed an IMAX camera when she accidentally drove into the camera person; luckily no one was injured. Okay, we guess that’s technically more like a cat, since they can’t drive motorcyclesÃ¢â‚¬Â¦consider us back on-board!

Let the creepiness begin! Warner Bros. has released the first The Dark Knight Rises‘ Tom Hardy Bane photo, a glimpse at the terrifying masked villain that looks like he’ll do justice to the gritty, unsettling feel Heath Ledger established as The Joker in The Dark Knight. As if this wasn’t spooky enough, the Dark Knight Rises website is equally chilling: pitch black, with just an eerie soundtrack of Nazi-esque chanting. We don’t know about you, but we are dying to see how sunny, girl-next-door Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle is going to stack up against all this scariness. The woman was in The Princess Diaries, for Alfred’s sake!